Founded in 2011, Bizbrains began as a consultancy helping enterprise organizations implement complex EDI integrations. Over time, the company recognized a bigger opportunity: that organizations of every size were struggling with brittle, poorly managed integration environments, often built around aging technology stacks, undocumented dependencies, and siloed ownership. These challenges increased operational risk, created compliance gaps, and slowed business agility.
Bizbrains evolved its business model to meet that demand, developing Link, a modern, cloud-native integration platform designed to bring visibility, standardization, and control to enterprise integrations. Built on containerized architecture, Link can run flexibly across hyperscale cloud platforms including Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, and private cloud environments.
At its core, the platform enables integration to become a shared responsibility between IT and the business, providing business users with secure access to operational data while allowing developers to standardize integration patterns and ensure compliance across ecosystems.
“Our goal has always been to make integration a team sport,” explains Paw Pedersen, CTO of Bizbrains. “IT shouldn’t be a bottleneck. Business teams need insight into how data flows, while IT needs control, security, and scalability.”
Security and Compliance Become Business Requirements
As Bizbrains transitioned from consultancy to platform provider, the nature of its risk profile shifted dramatically. Customers were no longer just asking for integration expertise, they expected an always-available platform supporting mission-critical business operations across finance, manufacturing, and logistics.
Failure or downtime wouldn’t impact only Bizbrains, it could cascade directly into their customers’ supply chains and regulatory operations.
“Many customers rely on us to run daily business processes,” says Karsten Markmann, CIO of Bizbrains. “If we’re down, their operations are stranded. In industries handling perishable goods or regulated financial data, downtime is simply not an option.”
At the same time, growing regulatory pressure across Europe heightened expectations:
NIS2 Directive
GDPR
DORA compliance for financial services customers
Compliance audits became more frequent and more demanding. Bizbrains realized security could no longer be handled through informal processes or internal best effort alone.
“We’d made small security efforts over time, but it wasn’t enough,” Karsten explains. “Implementing ISO 27001 gave us structure, and NIS2 forced us to take our maturity to another level. Now every deployment goes through risk analysis, and every incident leads to improvement.”
Scaling Security Without Scaling Headcount
For Bizbrains, the challenge wasn’t lack of awareness, it was lack of capacity.
Maintaining continuous 24/7 security monitoring, tuning Sentinel analytics, performing threat hunting, and staffing round-the-clock response would have required hiring seven additional specialists to cover shifts, holidays, and distinct technical roles.
“That simply wasn’t realistic,” Karsten says. “What we couldn’t do ourselves, we had to source externally - and for us, that became Ontinue.”
Bizbrains evaluated approximately eight MDR providers. Ontinue’s differentiation stood out quickly:
Deep native expertise across Microsoft Sentinel and Defender
Alignment with Bizbrains’ Microsoft platform strategy
Technology ownership rather than tool replacement
Competitive economics at enterprise scale
No vendor lock - MDR changes and Bizbrains’s data stays within its own datacenters.
Operational Security Through Partnership
With Ontinue’s Microsoft-first and AI-native MXDR services deployed, Bizbrains gained:
24/7 continuous monitoring and incident containment
Expert tuning of Sentinel alerts and analytics rules
Dedicated cyber advisory sessions focused on posture improvement and compliance alignment
Security reporting translated into board-level financial and operational risk language
“We don’t see Ontinue as a vendor, they’re an extension of our team,” Karsten says. “If we’re planning to deploy new security rules or make changes, we involve Ontinue early so everyone stays aligned.”
Now meeting regularly with Ontinue’s Cyber Advisors, Bizbrains continuously assesses risks, closes gaps, and aligns priorities based on regulatory and business drivers.
Hardening the Platform Behind the Scenes
Beyond threat detection and incident containment, Ontinue’s Cyber Advisory team helped enable hands-on security modernization across Bizbrains’ platform, including guidance around:
Insider Risk controls
Data Loss Prevention policies
Cloud App security monitoring
Policy enforcement aligned to least-privilege access strategies within Link
For CTO Paw Pedersen, this directly supports the business mission behind the platform. “In Link, security is built into how customers use the platform. Who can see what data, how long data is retained, audit logs - it all supports GDPR and NIS2 requirements. Security isn’t a selling point, it’s now a mandatory checkpoint for doing business.”
Bizbrains has since become one of the first companies in Denmark to achieve full NIS2 audit compliance, giving enterprise customers immediate confidence in the platform’s operational maturity.
Focused Teams, Greater Confidence
With Ontinue managing security operations, Bizbrains’ internal engineers no longer divert time away from product development or customer onboarding to chase alerts.
“Instead of worrying about what might be happening overnight, we can focus on reliability, product development, and customer success,” Karsten says. “That’s where our value to the business really lives.”
The security partnership also supports Bizbrains’ rapid vendor and customer onboarding model, enabling integrations to be deployed quickly using standardized templates while maintaining full monitoring coverage.
“Our customers need the flexibility of adding or replacing vendors fast,” Paw explains. “Security has to enable that agility, not slow it down.”
Built for the Future
As regulatory requirements continue to evolve and platform demands grow, Bizbrains views its partnership with Ontinue as foundational to its digital strategy.
Future priorities include:
Continued automation across SOC operations
Enhanced AI-assisted threat detection and response workflows
Expansion of standardized compliance frameworks to support international customer growth
By pairing Bizbrains’ vision for transparent, business-centric integration with Ontinue’s Microsoft- and AI-native security operations and cyber advisory expertise, Bizbrains has strengthened and scaled its security capabilities to further support business growth.
